​​“A powerful memoir, heart-wrenching, inspiring, thoroughly engrossing, reminiscent of Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and more recently Tara Westover’s Educated. Through one family’s story, we learn about challenges of poverty, migration, uprootedness, addiction, sexism, racism-- but also about the triumphant, spirited storyteller who survives to tell the tale.”

—Julia Alvarez, author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies​

Acclaimed essayist Jaquira Díaz writes an unflinching account of growing up in Puerto Rico and Miami as a queer, biracial girl searching for home as her family splits apart and her mother struggles with mental illness and addiction. As Díaz tells the story of her own struggles with depression and drug abuse and her experiences of violence woven in with Puerto Rico’s history of colonialism, every page vibrates with music and lyricism. Ordinary Girlsis a fiercely passionate, groundbreaking memoir about girlhood in a dangerous world, about how we’re not defined by the worst things we’ve ever done, and about surviving, even as we’re losing the people we love.